Support Us

Building the Savage Bloggers Network has been a labor of love. The project started back in 2009 and has been growing ever since. The downside to most labors of love is the cost associated with the effort. The SBN is a not-for-profit effort, and it will always remain such. Still, it does cost money (and time) to operate. That’s where you can help. Below is a summary of the costs we accrue and the time we spend on the SBN.

The Feed

The SBN Feed is a combination of both automated and manual additions. Some feeds are tagged or categorized as Savage Worlds, but others are not, and they require manual selection and addition to the published aggregated SBN feed.

The aggregated feed is produced using an open source RSS application called Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS). We also use TT-RSS to select items to feature on the SBN Podcast. TT-RSS generates feeds for every folder and label, including starred items. We use IFTTT to pull items from the “Starred” feed into a Google Doc that collects items to feature for the podcast.

The Podcast

Ron and Kristian have a lot of fun recording each episode of the Savage Bloggers Network Podcast, and they certainly don’t do it for the riches gained. Quite honestly, as time has passed, they pretty much do it for two reasons:

It’s cool to find things that are being created for Savage Worlds by fans, licensee, and publishers alike

It gives them an excuse to hangout once a week, which they like doing.

That said, there are costs associated with producing a podcast–mostly hardware, software, editing, and hosting.Blubrry’s small hosting is relatively inexpensive at $12 per month, but the more shows we do (like Simply Savage), the higher the cost of hosting. Before those files can be uploaded for your savage ears to listen to, they have to be edited, exported, and tagged appropriately, which takes time to do it ourselves or money to pay someone else to do it.

Additionally, the software landscape is ever changing. We’d like to explore new products and services that can potentially streamline our production cycle. For example, using a web-based service for multi-point recording might be in our future to do better interviews.

None of this is to imply that the Savage Bloggers Network Podcast is intended to cost you money. We’ll still produce these episodes for everyone to enjoy freely. The purpose of this Patreon campaign is solely to help us offset the cost in a sustainable way so that we can continue bringing you highlighted content from the Savage Worlds community every week as well as interviews and savage advice on running and playing the game.

Your patronage helps us do it all faster, better, and more, and with that, we thank you for helping us keep it fast, furious, and fun!